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AT THE MOVIES; Another Drama Beneath the Sea

Topicality isn't what Kathryn Bigelow had in mind when she began development on ''K-19'' four years ago. The plot outline of the film, about a Russian submarine trapped at the bottom of the sea, sounds alarmingly similar to the plight of the Russian sub Kursk, which held the world breathless last month.

But ''K-19,'' which Ms. Bigelow will begin filming in March, is based on another incident, though one equally tragic and equally true.

''This is the story of two men,'' Ms. Bigelow said over breakfast at the Toronto Film Festival, where her most recent film, the historical thriller ''The Weight of Water,'' had its world premiere, ''Nikolai Zateyev and Vladimir Yenin, who were Russian submarine captains at the height of the cold war in 1961. On the maiden voyage of Russia's first atomic ballistic nuclear submarine, it had a malfunction in its reactor at the bottom of the North Sea and began to melt down. This was off the coast of Norway, about a mile from where there was a NATO base.''

Kept secret at the time, the incident became public only when glasnost made it possible for Zateyev to publish his memoirs.

Ms. Bigelow, whose work includes the science-fiction film ''Strange Days'' and the police drama ''Blue Steel,'' has never restricted herself to anything resembling traditional ''women's pictures,'' and ''K-19'' (the title comes from the name of the sub) doesn't sound like an exception.

''Over the next few days,'' she said, ''these two men -- Zateyev, the commander, and Yenin, the executive officer -- managed to avert what could have been a Chernobyl-like disaster. It was a truly extraordinary situation that elicited courage in a way almost unthinkable in the face of certain, catastrophic disaster and miraculously did manage to have some survivors.''

The script, by the New York playwright Chris Kyle, is based on original research and interviews, notably with Zateyev's widow. ''One of my technical advisers in St. Petersburg happens also to have been very, very close with several of the officers on the Kursk,'' Ms. Bigelow said. ''The Kursk incident was an incredibly emotional experience for me and the people I am working with on this, because of how close I've become to this project and the individuals involved, and of having actually met some of the survivors of the K-19.

''But in a way what happened with the Kursk further impelled me to make this film. 'K-19' examines the courage and the prowess of these men. This will be the first major American motion picture in which Russians are the heroes, and I guess I have lofty intentions for it.

''Right now I'm afraid that the Russians are deeply embarrassed, that their pride is shattered. I feel I want to give them their pride back, but without the arrogance, and without the cold war disinformation. I don't want them to think they're having their face rubbed in the Kursk incident. I want them to see that they're being actually revered. There's a unique stamina and resilience in their psychology, and when you read Tolstoy and Pushkin, you see it all. It's an amazing mind-set, very, very different from our own.''

Factory and Family

The plot line of Laurent Cantet's social drama ''Human Resources'' hangs on the attempt to impose a 35-hour workweek in France, a measure intended by the Socialist government to create more jobs in a country that urgently needs them.

But, Mr. Cantet said by phone from his Paris office, ''I noticed that when I was presenting the film in Sundance that the first question that journalists from the U.S. and Canada asked me was, 'Is it true that in France you only work 35 hours a week?' And a lot of them added, 'Like that, you can have two jobs at once.' So there you see a very, very wide gap between our different ways of conceptualizing things.''

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In a restrained, documentarylike manner Mr. Cantet's film tells of Frank (Jalil Lespert), a young man from the working class who returns from business school to take a job as a junior executive in the factory where his father works. At first he hopes to use his new position to improve the lot of the workers by conducting a survey to see how the employees would like to see the 35-hour week structured. But when the smiling boss (Lucien Longueville), who has taken Frank under his wing, uses Frank's statistics as an excuse to reduce the work force, the young man finds himself caught in a classic conflict.

''The point of departure was the family story,'' Mr. Cantet said, ''I wanted to explore the links that necessarily exist between intimate affairs and politics. Private life is never really private. Everything we experience has to take the social environment into account.

''In the family there is a natural hierarchy between the father and the son. The idea of the film was to look at the workplace, and see how that hierarchy could be reversed.''

''Human Resources'' was cast almost entirely with nonprofessional actors, many of whom Mr. Cantet found by visiting government unemployment offices. ''I met five or six hundred people and did tests of them all and made my choices.''

Danielle Melador, who memorably plays a feisty union representative, really is a union representative, and is ''just as combative in life as she is in the film.'' The boss is played by an actual boss who took time off from his factory in a Paris suburb to appear in Mr. Cantet's movie.

''Human Resources'' was shot in a working factory in Normandy that produces parts for cars, but in the film its product remains somewhat mysterious.

''I wanted something abstract, just a bit of twisted metal really,'' Mr. Cantet said. ''The idea was to show that the father was attached to his work for work's sake, not out of an artisan's pride in a well-made object.''

Sanity Clause

''They were dear to me,'' said Kitty Carlisle Hart, speaking of her famously unruly co-stars in ''A Night at the Opera,'' the 1935 film she made with the Marx Brothers. ''They didn't play any tricks on me, and they liked me, because we became friends forever after that.''

Ms. Hart will appear at a members' screening of ''A Night at the Opera'' on Oct. 1 at 1:30 p.m. at the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street in the South Village, and answer questions afterward.

''I saw it recently at a benefit I did in Santa Fe,'' she said. ''And it was the first time that I'd seen it in a long, long time on a proper screen. Let me tell you something: It's no good on TV. But on a big screen it is hilarious. I enjoyed it very much.''